AI War Beta 5.021, "Hybrid Helper Pie," Released!

This one is filled with some really cool stuff that I had no hand in.  Keith has been really adding in some neat new features with this one, as well as a lot of housekeeping stuff.

First off, there's a lot of balance stuff in here.  AI superforts won't be so annoying to deal with anymore, and a lot of the neinzul ships in particular also got some balance shifts.  Then there were a bunch of smaller changes to things like showing the munitions boost amounts in tooltips, things of that nature.

Now to the new features: there's basically now an observer mode to the game, but it actually goes even deeper than that.  When players have the setting "allow team control of ships" enabled, then the observer can actually act as a "helper" instead, and share control of that player's ships, resource bars, and so on. 

That "switch to UI of other player" function actually works in regular gameplay between full players with the "allow team control of ships" setting on, come to that.  So it's a really pair of features in that it allows a) multiple full players to switch between each others' interfaces; b) one or more observer players to watch the game; c) one or more observers to act as "helpers" to one or more fully players.

There's actually a pretty substantial list of other tweaks and balance changes in this release, too, but that's definitely my favorite new feature in a while.  Enjoy!

This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 4.000 or later. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 4.000 or later, you can download that here.